180 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



lectures with but little alteration, though he evidently fully realised that to make 

 a readable book they needed to have been re-written. 



It is well, however, that the reader should be prepared for what is before him, 

 for he will certainly find this not only a colourless, but also a bewildering book. 

 Though his pages are crammed with facts, and evidences of original research, they 

 nowhere grip the attention. 



Briefly, the author has set himself the task of demonstrating the exceedingly 

 primitive character of man in regard to just those features wherein so many 

 writers have seen in him the last word in evolution, or evidences of design, or 

 special Creation, as the sympathies of the champions of these very opposite points 

 •of view inclined them. 



In marshalling his facts, so as to crush the extremists of these opposing 

 camps, the author has over-reached himself, that is to say he has pushed his 

 arguments too far. Throughout, he has insisted on the wide differences between 

 man and the pronograde mammals, among which he contends man has never 

 been included. Dr. Wood Jones may argue that all he means is that man was 

 never a terrestrial pronograde. This will not suffice. He strives, laboriously, to 

 show that the descent of man is to be traced continuously from an arboreal stock, 

 which, from the very nature of its habitat, was saved from becoming pronograde. 

 Yet indutiable witness to the contrary is to be found in the human body to-day, as 

 witness the suspension of the intestine, which, in the early embryonic stages of 

 development, is like that of the pronograde monkeys, while later it assumes the 

 arrangement which obtains in the orthograde Primates, like the gibbons. The 

 vestigial azygos lobe of the right lung, in like manner, bears witness to a prono- 

 grade stage, and the same is true of the case of a number of muscles now found in 

 the human body only as mere vestiges, but which were large and functional, 

 during a pronograde stage of development, answering to that of monkeys 

 to-day. 



More might profitably have been said of the foot of the Chimpanzee, and 

 mention might also have been made of the fact that the human infant, in its first 

 •efforts to stand alone, commonly endeavours to obtain a grip of the ground with 

 its toes, reminiscent of the time when it was a tree-dweller. Finally, we venture 

 to think that the post-arboreal stages of man, to which the author makes many 

 allusions, deserved a chapter to themselves. They are of immense interest, and 

 they would have served as a standard of comparison for the earlier chapters of 

 the book. 



Our complaint is not that Dr. Wood Jones has proved himself unequal to 



the task he set himself, a view which would not be tenable for a moment, but that 



he could have made his book vastly more entertaining : while, further, he would 



have given us, in place of a vague, nebulous conception, a crisply defined image 



of " Arboreal Man " which one could have contrasted with that most exquisitely 



beautiful product of evolution — the human body. 



W. P. P. 



MEDICINE 



The Essentials of Chemical Physiology for the use of Students. By W. D. 



Halliburton, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S. Ninth edition. [Pp. xi + 324, with 

 72 illustrations.] (London : Longmans, Green & Co., 1916. Price 6s. net.) 



Prof. Halliburton's Essentials of Chemical Physiology has reached its ninth 

 edition within twenty-three years. 



Its success was to be expected, for the author combines the faculty of making 



